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Downsizing Blog

Bloomberg is reporting more bad news for the nation’s air traffic control system, which is run by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA is $500 million overbudget and six years behind schedule on a $2.1 billion technology upgrade project.

Former President George W. Bush’s book Decision Points is apparently selling quite well. The book includes a defense of the president’s fiscal record, and a table on page 447 compares Bush to prior presidents on spending and debt (you can see the table on Amazon’s search inside feature).

Taxpayers received a rare, albeit small and temporary, victory late last week when Senate Democrats were forced to shelve a pork-laden omnibus bill after establishment Republicans withdrew their support. Instead, Congress will now pass a continuing resolution to fund the government at current levels until the new Congress is seated in January.

Japan has announced that it will cut its corporate tax rate by five percentage points. Japan and the United States had been the global laggards on corporate tax reform, so this leaves America with the highest corporate rate among the 34 wealthy nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

It is little wonder that Congress’s current approval rating is at the lowest point (13 percent) in the 30+ years Gallup has been asking that question. Consider the 1,924 page, $1.1 trillion pork-laden omnibus appropriations bill that Senate Democrats (and some establishment Republicans) want to pass along with an additional $160 billion in “emergency” spending.

Economist Richard Vedder has written a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “The Great College-Degree Scam.” Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Vedder found that “approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.”

A major shortcoming of the deficit reduction plan concocted by the president’s Fiscal Commission is that it assumed that the federal government should continue doing everything it currently does. For example, the plan proposed a 15 cent per gallon increase in the federal gasoline tax to fund infrastructure projects. But why not allow the private sector to play a greater role in financing and maintaining infrastructure like roads?